Summary
Far-right populist Calin Georgescu led Romania’s presidential election with 22% of the vote, narrowly ahead of leftist Prime Minister Marcel Ciolacu (21%), setting up a runoff on December 8.
Georgescu’s unexpected rise, driven by anti-establishment sentiment, has disrupted the political landscape.
His vague populist platform includes boosting local production and criticizing NATO. Analysts suggest his surge reflects voter dissatisfaction, with some suspecting potential Russian influence.
The election, marked by moderate turnout (52.4%), occurs amid economic challenges, high inflation, and tensions from Romania’s proximity to Ukraine’s war zone.
But US politics are universal, don’t you know?
Romanians have been dejected about politics for a very long time and in very dangerous ways. The entire “they are all the same” narrative has been so pervasive and the attempts at centrist liberal reform parties so unsuccessful that the populist right having a shot is not surprising. If anything it feels oddly overdue.
It’s still bad, though, but I am very nervous at a scenario where options are reduced to actively supporting the PSD status quo or pro-Russian far right populism. If you’ve heard younger Romanian men talk about politics for the past decade that doesn’t bode well long term.
The reality is, that for many people in many countries (like me here in Germany) the US elections have an actual impact. Tariffs, geopolitics, economy, that will impact me, but also people in Italy, Ukraine, Taiwan and Australia.
Romania? Well, to be honest I hear about that country maybe once a month and unless an absolute catastrophe is happening over there, the impact on me is practically nil.
Yeah, well, if you are German Romania is effectively your Eastern border, what with being the EU country closest to Russia, bordering Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova, with the larger Moldova territory extending into Romania itself and being currently a stated occupation objective of Putin.
So… maybe it’s time to take the blinders off, stop caring so much about transatlantic politics out of sheer cultural imperialism and start caring a bit about your own territorial integrity. Just as a smidge of friendly advice.
I think you’re overestimating the importance of Romania.
A Russia friendly president in power has very negative implications, yes, but that’s exactly why this is in the news right now.
I’ll be blunt, but from a German perspective, Romania is a source of cheap labor and maybe a logistics hub towards Ukraine. That’s it. Unless it falls to Russia or starts a war itself, its internal politics don’t really matter here.
Man, the EU is so boned.
Look, it matters for the same reason Hungary should matter more to you than the US. For one, Hungary insists on giving visas to Russians, and the more Russia-aligned EU countries you get the worse your border security with Russia gets in that exact way. Get enough of them in there and it gets so much harder to enact Europe-wide legislation on security and international relations.
You perceive Romania as cheap labor and a military asset, I assure you both Russians and Romanians perceive it differently. I understand what your priorities are, I’m telling you they’re wrong, which is not surprising coming from central European arrogance but would be good to nudge back to reality before it’s entirely too late.
I know you’re exaggerating for effect, but I am not, it’s time to pay attention to Eastern Europe (as in, Eastern EU) and start to make plans to decouple from the US much more aggressively because they are definitely not going to be allies for the foreseeable future.
It would be preferable for Europe overall for Romania to be, say, not as corrupt, and consequently not as poor. It’d make Europe stronger. I am very much in favour of seeing Romania make huge strides in those kinds of regards.
But that’s a long-term thing, for the simple reason that Romania has neither the unity nor vision for huge steps as e.g. the Baltics took. That’s just me extrapolating the trajectory you’re currently on: Short-term Romania will be, comparatively, corrupt and poor and whether it’s currently taking one step back or two steps forwards has limited impact on, well, everything. We’re not going to lose sleep over it. If you are losing sleep over it, become a politician, rally your countrymen.
We’re going to cheer from the sidelines but Europe isn’t an empire, we won’t be ruling your country for you. And if you try to pull a Hungary we’ll extort the Romanian powers that be just like we did with Orban. As in, they will be running the country without EU funds.
Noone’s ignoring the east when it comes to the Russia question any more. As to decoupling the French are pretty busy getting everyone on board with it. Have you asked them whether they could share some nukes with you? That kind of thing would help stuff along. What doesn’t really help things along is buying F35s from the Yanks.
Also have you noticed that we’re both taking a not exactly pro-NATO stance here. It’s going to take a while before there’s a clear division between populism serving the “yeah Atlanticism really was a bad idea” vs. “Europe should be run from Moscow” lines, it’s too early for that, dust will have to settle first. Currently populists are still able to serve both positions simultaneously by being a bit fuzzy about their positions, what positions they actually hold, well, with populists you never know.
Oh, agreed. And much as the EU has taken that position fairly actively, that’s ultimately an issue of internal Romanian politics and why it’s worth being at least vaguely aware of what they look like, at least around elections.
I’m not even sure that I’m not taking an atlanticist position here. At this point in the game I’m not even sure what that means anymore, because for the second time in a decade we’re in a scenario where the US isn’t “atlanticist” as a matter of policy. I don’t take issue with a defense pact among the surviving liberal democracies, it’s just hard to visualize what that looks like if the US is not on the list.
Short term it looks a lot like the EU, assuming their liberal and social democracies hold up. Longer term I have no idea. A larger thing involving parts of Asia and South America but not the US and Israel? I certainly hope that set of alignments isn’t put to the test militarily, but who the hell even knows anymore.
Oh, and for the record, I am not Romanian myself and, at least as far as civil society goes, I’d dispute that the East isn’t being ignored, beyond using Orban as a culture wars icon.
Hungary does matter, Orban is in the news pretty much every week.
No, I’m not. But you seem to ignore what I wrote. As one of the dominos falling into russian hands it does matter, that’s what I wrote before. For everything else, it has no impact. You can find that stupid and arrogant as much as you want, but that’s the reality.
Apart from geopolitics, there is de facto no connection to Romania.
It’s literally your territory. Your political organization. You are a citizen of the EU just as they are. Their elections impact your organizations directly. They impact who writes your laws in Germany.
That’s not geopolitics, friend, that’s domestic politics for you. The fact that so many Europeans just can’t parse this but compulsively follow every detail of US politics is a disease. It’s the gangreous abscess of US cultural imperialism and it’s doing real damage.
Big echoes of the mid 2010s, having weird conversations with delusional Brits spouting EU misinformation with zero critical sense before Brexit. It’s terrifying.
And again: what impact does it have in reality?
How informed do you feel about the re-election here in Germany? How’s your opinion on the current situation in Sweden? Could you name the head of state of, say, Belgium?
You’re imposing a completely unrealistic expectation on people. Yes, a bit more interest in Eastern Europe would be nice, but it remains a fact that most of it doesn’t matter to us all that much.
Well I, for one, am terrified about the collapse of the German coalition, recent regional results an the upcoming outlook. Less up to date on Sweden, beyond the fact that they’ve been yet another struggling center right regime and the abuse of their crises, and in particular their crime stats, as a far-right propaganda strategy. Of Belgium off the top of my head I can tell you their struggles to form stable governments are legendary (and that this is despite better than average economic performance across the inflation crisis) and that process is very much ongoing.
Now, I don’t blame anybody, myself included, for not having a full understanding of the many vectors of EU politics across the Union. That’s an impossible task. I do, however, find it horrifying to actively dismiss the relevance of far-right, pro-Russian advances in any Union member as unimportant to one’s own interests. Doubly so if the person in question can name more than two US Senators or members of the House.
I don’t care that you don’t know off the top of your head, I care that you don’t want to know and think it’s irrelevant. Because it does have a real impact. It impacts Union security, it impacts the power balance in the European Council and, if turned into a trend, will eventually impact the power balance in Parliament.
And again, those matter to you because they literally write laws directly applicable to you. If that doesn’t trigger alarm bells for you, then yes, I’m gonna say you’re not paying enough attention. You don’t need to learn the intricacies of post-communist political alignments, or how typical left-right alignments don’t work the same way in that context or the names of everybody involved… but at least I’d expect the news to make your ears perk up and read a report, especially if you’re busy doomscrolling individual Trump cabinet appointments at the time.
Well expect a huge influx of cheap labor in the coming decades when the far right starts winning elections over there. If you think that won’t affect the German labor and housing market in a negative way then you are just naive.
Are you misinterpreting me on purpose?
What exactly do you think “geopolitics” mean? Discussing paper thickness of maps?
So a country’s internal politics don’t matter unless they fall to Russia - that’s what you said, right?
But wouldn’t you agree that the country’s internal politics are what decides if it falls to Russia or not? If education is not a subject they invest in, if its population isn’t happy with the status quo, if they exhibit corruption, if their healthcare system is so bad that the middle class emigrates and leaves behind only the oligarchs and the poor, if their justice system doesn’t work and they don’t feel safe… All these internal politics have a huge impact on if a country can be influenced by Russia or any other nefarious agent.
I don’t get what you’re saying. You keep saying “yeah but we don’t care about X”, while X seems to be the direct cause of some of your problems that you DO care about. Are you trying to say Romania should take care of its shit internally so we don’t have to deal with it, and not let it grow to the point where it’s a problem for the rest of the EU?
You’re conflating a bunch of things here.
What exactly am I supposed to do about internal Romanian politics? Impose a medical Securitate to protect everyone’s health? Invade directly? That’s a tad arrogant, isn’t it?
Internal politics only become relevant for people on the outside, if they affect the international politics. And even then, what is the outside supposed to do? They can only react. And realistically, you can’t expect people to know enough of the internal politics of every country within 10.000km to be able to have an opinion on it.